Hand of the Hunter: Chosen of Nendawen, Book II by Mark Sehestedt Page A

through young saplings and bouncing off bigger ones.
    A snarl, and then Hweilan felt sharp teeth sink into her shoulder. She screamed, and an instant later they slammed into the trunk of a tree. The rough bark scraped a swath of skin off Hweilan’s arm, then they were moving again.
    Hitting the tree had weakened the woman’s grip around Hweilan. The next broke it altogether. But it also knocked all the air out of Hweilan, and she thought she felt a rib crack.
    She kept going down the hill, the world tumbling around her, branches and rocks scraping and gouging her skin.Hweilan could hear the other woman crashing just behind her, but all she could see was a blur of green and brown as the world shot past.
    And then there was nothing. No grasping arms. No roots scraping her back or trees slamming into her ribs. Just open air washing past her. She had time to take in an agonized breath as she went over the cliff.
    Hitting the water felt like slamming through a wall. But this wall had a current. Hweilan scraped along a rocky bottom that tore away the cloak she’d been wearing. Panic seized her. Hweilan had just enough rational thought left to clench her jaw shut. Terror pushed her to scream, but she knew that if she did the river would fill her lungs and she would die down in the cold gloom.
    Hweilan pushed off the riverbed. Her head broke the surface just as the river crashed down a steep slope over boulders in a series of rapids. She had only an instant to take a breath, then she went under again.
    This time she tumbled. She lost the light, had no idea which way was up, and could no longer see the bottom. Hweilan clenched her jaw shut, fighting the reflex to breathe.
    I’m dying, she thought. A moment of panic, so fierce it shut out all other thought, then a strange sort of peace settled over her. The pain in her chest was beyond agony, and her head felt as if it were about to burst. She knew that no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn’t be able to hold her breath much longer.
    Then her foot scraped along the bottom.
    Her body reacted instinctively, and when she pushed, half her body shot out of the water, and she filled her lungs with sweet air.
    She had never learned to swim. In Narfell, the only water were the shallow streams that thawed in summer. At Highwatch, the deepest water she’d ever seen was her bathtub. But the river wasn’t deep—not much above her head. Hweilan sank, pushed off the bottom to breach thesurface, took a breath, sank, pushed off the bottom, breached, took a breath … again and again and again.
    The initial panic subsided, but she knew she couldn’t keep this up. Already her limbs were aching, and she knew all it would take was one cramp to put her under the water forever.
    On her next breach, she took a look around. She was in the middle of the river, and the shores on either side were at least fifty feet away—and both were sheer rock walls, slick and mossy. Upstream and behind her was only the river—no sign of the woman that had attacked her. Downstream …
    Panic seized her again at what she saw.
    Nothingness.
    A hundred yards or so, and the river just ended in a mist. She’d grown up in mountains. She knew what that meant. She was headed for a waterfall. It might only be a few feet, or it might be a thousand. No way to tell from her vantage.
    She went down again—and this time she went deep. Her feet could not find the bottom. The constant roar of the river deepened, strengthened, filling her so that her entire body
thrummed
with it—and by that she knew the fall before her was no slope of a few feet. She was about to go over a cliff.
    Hweilan scrambled and kicked and thrashed, desperate to find the bottom. Nothing. Only water, flowing faster and faster by the moment. Her lungs, wanting air, began to ache. She gave up trying to find the bottom and began to try to claw and thrash her way to the surface. But for every foot she gained, the current pushed her down another